Thank You

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If ever we doubted that the American republic is driven by the people at a speed the people determine, the events of last month on the subject of immigration should remind us of the people's power over their representatives.

Last fall, few observers expected that the presidential election would serve as a referendum on whether to try to fix the broken system that allows at least 11 million people to reside in the country without permission.

After the election, when the analysts had parsed the numbers and discovered with shock or elation that legal Hispanic voters in their millions had decided the election in favor of President Barack Obama, the issue reached a new level of urgency, especially for Republicans.

Many Republicans realized more clearly that loud hostility to the 11 million illegals is no way to seek the votes of the 17 million naturalized citizens or the 23.7 million Hispanics eligible to vote. Even those who had been loudly hostile -- or excessively devoted to the enforcement of outdated laws -- gained a new sense of inevitable futility.

We should not usually rejoice when someone abandons principle for a little electoral advantage, but it depends on the principle: When senators like Strom Thurmond of South Carolina were forced to abandon their strenuous devotion to racial segregation because that was no longer the way to get re-elected, the American republic was stronger for it.

In the same way, we should celebrate if the recent electoral shake-up forces more Americans to abandon their principle of protection for native-born workers. The republic and the economy will be stronger if we return to the older principle of welcoming strangers and putting them to work.

Undocumented or Illegal?

In politics, words have meaning beyond their mere definitions. Those who speak of illegal immigrants usually are people who want to deport them. Those who speak of undocumented residents usually are people who want to give them a path to citizenship.

But even the people of the former persuasion acknowledge that there has been a bipartisan consensus for three decades or more that the immigration laws ought to sound tough and be hard to enforce.

Thus there are laws about deportation as a process, but no laws making it a crime to enter the country or reside here without permission. There are civil laws against hiring illegal aliens but no laws making it a crime, and no laws making it a crime or a civil offense to be the illegal resident who is hired.

Real life is even kinder and gentler. In real life, the U.S. does not try hard to deport many of the undocumented people it does catch, unless they have been convicted of serious crimes. In real life, there is almost no enforcement of the laws forbidding legal or illegal immigrants from becoming public charges by receiving welfare benefits.

Immigration-enforcement officials say they don't have the resources to enforce these strictures, or to monitor the whereabouts of about 50 million people entering the U.S. each year, or to apprehend those who are residing here illegally but peaceably.

It would be a bit more practical if some Americans could get over their historic aversion to national identification cards, but most authorities agree that realistic enforcement just isn't realistic.

Where's Waldo?

Congress must agree on practical enforcement rather than pious lawmaking, or the latest immigration reform will fail. The U.S. needs secure borders and ports of entry, not simply to keep people out but to identify and track the people who do come in. Nearly half of the current population of undocumented aliens residing in the U.S. simply overstayed their legal welcome. The people in charge of what is amusingly called Homeland Security still have no system to track legal guests who become illegal. They also cannot keep track of those who are here.

A leading example of the old system is President Obama's Kenyan half-uncle Onyango Obama, who has been in the country illegally since 1962, when he overstayed a student visa. The Boston Globe reports that papers it received under the Freedom of Information Act showed Onyango Obama had received deportation orders in 1986 and 1989 and lost an appeal in 1992, but he never left, and nobody made him go.

Onyango Obama is apparently eligible for permanent residence and a path to citizenship under a "registry" program for undocumented people who have been here continuously since Jan. 1, 1972. He just didn't bother to apply, so he remained illegal, undocumented, or whatever.

Whether Onyango Obama should have been deported or given a clean bill of health, it's galling that nobody, not even he, thought it mattered.

New Americans for the Economy

Any discussion of immigration reform should include the age-old question "Who benefits?" Although it's probably vain to make this suggestion, the foremost beneficiary should be the U.S. as a whole, not any ethnic group or political party.

Even at our current levels of unemployment, the U.S. is short of some workers: some for jobs Americans won't do at the prevailing wage and some for jobs Americans can't do, at least not in sufficient numbers to fill all the needs.

On the former side, we hire illegals to mind our children, care for our elderly, bus our tables, pick our vegetables, trim our lawns, and clean our homes. On the latter side, we offer a limited number of visas to highly skilled workers in science, technology, engineering, and math, but not other fields, and we offer a few heavily restricted visas to investors and entrepreneurs.

Our economy needs such people; we know that because so many can get work in the relatively free sectors of the economy. Yet we put up walls against them both physical and bureaucratic, so that it's mostly a matter of chance who gets in. The legal selection process instead favors a third group: family members of people who are already here.

A reformed system should assure Americans that the people who are offered a path to citizenship have been selected for their potential to contribute to the U.S. economy.